Hollywood legend Pam Grier looked back on the beginning of her decades-long career, during which she made a point of appearing nude on film.
Sherri Shepherd spoke to the action star during Monday’s (June 12) broadcast of Sherri about why she made a point of performing nude scenes on-camera, starting what Grier calls the “Brown Nipple Revolution.”
“I get my womanhood, my foxiness, my Coffy-ness, from each and every one of you,” Grier said to Shepherd and the audience, before later adding, “I wanted to show us being beautiful at all stages of who we are.”
Grier is often credited with being one of the industry’s first female action stars. But a big part of her legacy includes her willingness to appear nude in some of her biggest hits, like Foxy Brown and Coffy, a move which Shepherd said was meant to “empower women.”
The actress explained that, before she starred in the 1974 hit Foxy Brown, she once played an Indigenous African woman in the movie The Arena: “I was studying National Geographic like, okay, when I do the frontal nudity, do I need to shave or wax?” she joked. “But it was the beauty of the freedom of the African woman.”
When Shepherd commented that African American audiences “weren’t seeing” that kind of representation on-screen at the time, Grier replied it might be because they looked “too good,” sparking laughter from the audience.
“We had to find our confidence in our beauty which wasn’t seen, so therefore we don’t develop our audience, we don’t develop our sensibility,” Grier explained. “We don’t develop the psychopathology in our character to enjoy who we are as women.”
She has previously spoke about starting the Brown Nipple Revolution, telling Rolling Stone in 2022 that she was “trying to break that line of what was acceptable in society” during her onscreen heyday.
“I did nudity in Coffy and Foxy Brown to help create the audience, to make people accept seeing women in power, with martial arts and guns,” she said at the time. “I wanted to make people start seeing women of color, because we weren’t the epitome of sexual attraction for the male audience, in movies, magazines, anything. ”
Grier is set to appear in the upcoming movie Cinnamon opposite Damon Wayans, which premieres this month on Tubi.
Sherri airs on weekdays at 10 a.m. ET. Check the Sherri website for local listings.